Gasta to Utilise Twitter in Search Results

While many still struggle to find a purpose for using Twitter, and Twitter ceases to generate revenue for itself (though it's coming sooner or later), the social network continues to take the world by storm. Naturally there are plenty of opportunities there or businesses to capitalize on.


There are a variety of ways business owners and marketing professionals can use Twitter to benefit their businesses. Twitters' search feature alone has some potential for attracting new customers. The first article in this newsletter discusses this. The second article looks at how Twitter can be used for building natural, organic links, despite Twitter links being nofollowed and shortened. If you have some ideas about how Twitter can benefit businesses, we'd love to hear them. Share them here. If you have tips or comments specifically about link building with Twitter, please share those here.

Before we get into that though, let's look at some research and statistics regarding Twitter. Let's get a feeling for just what we're dealing with this popular communication tool.

The Twitter Explosion

New data from comScore indicates that Twitter approached 10 million users in February. That's a growth of over 700% from February 2008. On top of that, worldwide visitors climbed over 5 million more. Just in the US, visitors climbed over 1000% in a year's time.
The Twitter Audience

The two largest age demographics on Twitter are the 45-54 crowd, and the 25-34 crowd. Interestingly, the youngsters (12-17) are the smallest demographic as comScore notes, referencing info from Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters.
What are Twitterers Searching for Though?

Well, it's mostly the usual kind of queries you would expect to find on other search engines. Entertainment searches dominate. No surprise there. Hitwise looks at top searches for the week ending March 21.

A nice convenient way to see what people are interested in right now, however, is to simply look at the right column of your Twitter home page and look at the "Trending Topics" section. That will pretty much lay it out there for you.

You can take that list for what it's worth and do with it what you will. The big draw to using Twitter search and trends is that it is real-time, and you can get involved with what people are talking about at the moment. This makes engaging with potential customers on topics that are interesting to them that much easier.